In the age of Romanticism and the following decades, authors, painters and musicians were gripped with a frenzy for roaming all over Europe. What was this new kind of traveler searching for, at a time when crossing borders, seas and mountains required so much effort, time and money?

In the late eighteenth century, the Grand Tour, which was the invention of a more personal way of traveling, put Rome (and Pompeii) at the very center of Europe’s cultural map, inspiring writers and artists to rediscover the marvels of Antiquity, the splendors of Italian art, and the wondrous light of southern climes. While it was sometimes a consequence of political exile, for many of them (the women in particular) the journey turned into a powerful lever for emancipation.

From archeological sites to artists’studios, from roadside inns to gambling halls and ballrooms, these free-thinking, often polyglot and generally French-speaking men and women of quality wove an incomparable network of cultural – and sometimes political – exchanges that spanned the continent, from Saint Petersburg to Geneva, London to Constantinople, and Paris to Rome, prefiguring, in their way, today’s Europe.

Lavishly illustrated and composed like a gallery of moving portraits, this book accompanies writers, painters and musicians in their peregrinations, and situates their creations in the longer timeframe of the cultural history of a period in which traveling was both a tiring physical trial and an exhilarating personal adventure… as well as an introduction to the world.